I have to admit that when I picked this book up off the library shelves, I was expecting it to be rather more eco-horror than it was. I was expecting, from the cover and the blurb, a story about a man going after the crocodile that had eaten his wife, but that's only a very small part of this historical novel, which is more about the experiences of colonisation in Papua New Guinea. Hoiri Sevese grows from a child to a man, marries, loses his wife, and ends up stuck in the middle of the Japanese-Australian conflict that took place in World War Two. 

I believe that this was the first published novel by a Papua New Guinean author, and I'd absolutely read more from him. The exploitation of the Indigenous people here is affecting, and the main character's continued bafflement about why the Australian colonists behave the way that they do is enormously sympathetic. Most interesting to me, though (aside from the crocodile bits) are the slice of life sections in the earlier parts of the novel; the depiction of village life, and the way that people interact with each other and with their environment. I know vanishingly little about Papua New Guinea, and while this was written some fifty plus years ago now, it still manages to make a dent in all that ignorance.